Basically, that was it for the next ten years. Nothing changed for me until about two or three years ago when I got Netflix and actually had something to use the higher bandwidth for. Sure, in the interim I got DSL and then cable internet access, but to be honest, I don't do much that requires high bandwidth. Once I never had to perform an initial "connect" phase to my internet activities, it was all smooth sailing.

Ah, the good old days when you could put '+++ATH' in your signature and figure out who had bought the cheap modems.

Fun fact - the Hayes command set never went away, it just evolved into GSM. If your cell phone lets you talk directly to the baseband chipset (e.g. Nokia N900) you can dial a number or send a text message with AT commands.

Ivo Shandor:Ah, the good old days when you could put '+++ATH' in your signature and figure out who had bought the cheap modems.

Fun fact - the Hayes command set never went away, it just evolved into GSM. If your cell phone lets you talk directly to the baseband chipset (e.g. Nokia N900) you can dial a number or send a text message with AT commands.

Bastard. I never thought of that :)

I thought the illustration in the article was an elegant way of showing the conversation.

unyon:Actually, If you're on DSL or cable, you don't use a modem. That term refers to devices that MOdulate and DEModulate tones over a PSTN.

According to Wiki:

A modem (modulator-demodulator) is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data. Modems can be used over any means of transmitting analog signals, from light emitting diodes to radio. The most familiar example is a voice band modem that turns the digital data of a personal computer into modulated electrical signals in the voice frequency range of a telephone channel. These signals can be transmitted over telephone lines and demodulated by another modem at the receiver side to recover the digital data.

I don't know about you, but I see nothing about modulating only tones over PTSN as the only possible definition for a modem.

I use five modems every day at work to communicate with traffic signals. Stupid DOS program hangs up with AT H instead of ATH, took me a while to find a modem that would understand it... Still works than the windows 95 program...

Mikey1969:300baud: Uncle Pooky: I remember when getting a 14,400 baud modem was a significant upgrade.

Noob.

I remember days when hard drives were a "new" copncept, modems were somethign only the programming teacher had, and color CRT monitors were a significant upgrade.

Noob. I remember moving up from punch cards and saving programs on magnetic tape three or more times, because it was very likely you wouldn't be able to restore. All upper case character sets. Memory measured in bytes. My first modem was an acoustic coupler; I think it was 150 baud though it may have been 110, I'm ashamed I can't remember.

Veritas333:I use five modems every day at work to communicate with traffic signals. Stupid DOS program hangs up with AT H instead of ATH, took me a while to find a modem that would understand it... Still works than the windows 95 program...

That explains a lot about my daily commute.

Traffic light: Oh, here comes a car down the road. Better switch to red.*I pull up, wait at the red. There are no cars to be seen.*Traffic light: Good. Good. Wait here my pretty.*I wait longer. I see a car starting to come from the green side.*Traffic light: Here comes another car! HE TOO MUST WAIT! I'll give them the green turn arrow just to mess with them!*We both wait at the light until a car comes to use the green turn arrow.*Traffic light: REDS ALL AROUND! NOBODY WILL GO!

very nice graphic, I need to see about making one of these for my company's dial-up network service and our bearer services. I think my 286 was the first computer I had that I added a modem to so I could scour BBS systems

jtown:It didn't take all night. More like 5-10 minutes for a high res (640x480) GIF. And that was back in the 2400bps days.

Those "high resolution" JPEGs were a killer, though. It took long enough that I could finish fapping to the Persian Kitty purrfect pose of the week before anything actually interesting showed up on the screen.

xenomorpheus:very nice graphic, I need to see about making one of these for my company's dial-up network service and our bearer services. I think my 286 was the first computer I had that I added a modem to so I could scour BBS systems

for you kids out there, BBS was , aw hell go wiki it already

Positive luxury. I had to solder a pair of Motorola serial I/O chips onto the motherboard of a Commodore 8032 and write my own comm routines in 8 bit assembler to get onto the local BBS.

Marcus Aurelius:xenomorpheus: very nice graphic, I need to see about making one of these for my company's dial-up network service and our bearer services. I think my 286 was the first computer I had that I added a modem to so I could scour BBS systems

for you kids out there, BBS was , aw hell go wiki it already

Positive luxury. I had to solder a pair of Motorola serial I/O chips onto the motherboard of a Commodore 8032 and write my own comm routines in 8 bit assembler to get onto the local BBS.

And we were glad.

I can't remember who said it but I always liked the quote (paraphrased here): "the problem with modern programmers isn't that they can't stuff a device driver into a spare 24 bytes they found in unused scratch memory, but that they won't even try."

300baud:Mikey1969: 300baud: Uncle Pooky: I remember when getting a 14,400 baud modem was a significant upgrade.

Noob.

I remember days when hard drives were a "new" copncept, modems were somethign only the programming teacher had, and color CRT monitors were a significant upgrade.

Noob. I remember moving up from punch cards and saving programs on magnetic tape three or more times, because it was very likely you wouldn't be able to restore. All upper case character sets. Memory measured in bytes. My first modem was an acoustic coupler; I think it was 150 baud though it may have been 110, I'm ashamed I can't remember.

AHHHH, punchcards...

When I was a kid, we went on a tour of the Sheriff's station, and they took us in a room and showed us their new computer, all punchcard activated and huge... The guy loaded in a punchcard, and the printer went to town, eventually printing up what was probably a 20x30 picture of the Mona Lisa, Not quite ASCII art, but that's the closest I can come to something I've seen since, it printed regular characters, anything on the keyboard, and overstriking to create shade and texture. Crude by today's standards, but absofarkinglutely amazing in 1980-ish.

When the pic was done, the guy doing the tour took it off the printer and asked who wanted it. Crickets commenced to fiddling... I was in shock, I held up my hand and went home with this absolutely cool piece of art. It was the coolest part of the tour, the only other things I remember is the lockers where they have to put their guns before walking into any area with prisoners(Something I call BS on to this day in the movies), and their story of how they had to change their lock system because some guy jammed the place where the striker for the lock is supposed to sit full of gum wrappers, and since it was spring-loaded, the door never latched. Guy walked out the door, easy-peasy, I guess.

The picture may exist, but sadly I am dependent on my aunt and uncle who used to be my adoptive parents, and when I called 'em out for being money-grubbers during the prayer I was asked to give at my grandmother's funeral, they stopped giving me the few things they still had from my childhood.... :(

I also remember getting my Social Security checks after my mother died, they were printed on punchcards... In a way, they still aren't such a bad idea, EMP doesn't hurt paper, right?